About the Project

It isn’t often a 100+ year old organisation has to stand up its processes and technology systems from scratch but this is precisely what happened to MLC Life Insurance when NAB sold its majority stake to Japan’s Nippon Life in late 2016. As a result of sale, MLC was required to become stand alone and remove itself to the NAB ecosystem. In order to achieve this, the $400M+ ‘Sanagi’ programme was established.

What we did

As one of four domain leads, Blueberry worked with MLC Life Insurance to provide architectural, orchestration and delivery oversight for the Digital and Salesforce teams. Under significant pressure to rapidly standup platforms, we worked with the business to clearly identify business processes and establish a reference architecture. A comprehensive set of processes, supporting specifications and detailed stories were compiled to establish a budget to deliver within predefined release cycles. The recommendation to stand up a team of contractors over tier 1 & 2 consulting firms was endorsed and a rapid recruitment process for ten resources was executed.

Due to the professionalism and capability of the assembled team, the scope of the CRM project was doubled to include the quote-and-apply and underwriting processes. These processes are at the heart of the organisation’s sales and had to support a complex number of service offerings & channels. As part of this work, a focus to streamline and drive more business via online channels was identified as a key strategic goal. This requirement was delivered online to the organisation’s customers, advisers and third parties such as insured superannuation customers using a series of React / Sitecore portals. The first of these services to be launched, the superannuity-focused LifeView portal has been highly awarded and was recently recognised as the industry’s most innovative white label product.

One of the key elements we contributed to the enterprise architecture was establishing an enterprise messaging bus to aid in reducing the complexity of integrating with a large volume of platforms. This was done with the view that the CRM could tap into this message bus as an observer and establish a view of the interactions taking place with the organisation’s customer across all key operational platforms. As a result, the business can see the policies, payment history, mailed out and received post and email, cases and history in one location making MLC truely customer focused.

So where to next?

This is but one phase of MLC’s transition to independence and Blueberry is there to assist the organisation on this journey. We are playing key roles in helping extend the organisation’s platform to cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, evaluating the organisation’s data lake, analysis and data science capabilities and driving forward the information and functions delivered using Salesforce.